GINNY SYKES

"My art explores archetypal forms as they arise in both dreams and waking states of consciousness. I draw on Jung’s theories of creativity and the collective unconscious to bring my interests in alchemy, feminism and modernism together. I came of age as an artist loving abstraction and expressionism and approach my work through a lens both critical of and nostalgic towards modernism. I want to challenge, wrestle with, and reconcile the modernist canon with a feminist perspective of intervention. I am interested in challenging definitions of what is beautiful and ugly. Cultivating this dissonance, I create a conscious interplay between order and disorder, often combining subtle mark making with aggressively handled surfaces. In some of the works a formal compositional structure such as the diptych and multiple panels further disrupts harmony and creates a tension of opposites that contains these tensions in a serial, cinematic format."